Friday, August 13, 2010

The spreading purple and red areas in the video dramatically illustrate the rising flood waters of unemployment that have spread across the country the last three years. The Obama administration seems helpless to do much about this vast outpouring of human misery, and Democrats are likely to pay the price at the polls this fall, as Frank Rich notes in the NYT.

But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned. Instead we get the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, offering the thin statistical gruel that job growth has returned “at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries.”

What happened? In 1992, a Democrat famously ran against Bush unemployment with the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid!" A new era of prosperity ensued. Now another Democratic president has taken over the wreckage left by another Bush presidency, but instead of boldness, the Democrats offer at best a timid holding action against a renewed conservative uprising. Rich again:

If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.